September 10, 1999. Copyright 1999. Graphic News. All rights reserved.

EAST TIMOR BACKGROUNDER

LONDON, September 10, Graphic News: IN THE SEVEN days since U.N. officials in East Timor announced the results of an August 30 referendum Ð in which an overwhelming 78.5 percent of the Indonesian provinceÕs voters chose independence for the territory Ð more than 200,000 East Timorese have been forced to leave their homeland. 
Two militia-run ÒconcentrationÓ camps in West Timor are now the homes of 60,000-100,000 people and tens of thousands of East TimorÕs 800,000 population have fled to the mountains.
In the southern town of Suai, Vatican media reports that militias have massacred between 100 and 250 people, including two priests and three nuns, in a grenade attack on a church and refugee camp. Fifteen Catholic priests and nuns have been killed in Dili and Baucau.
On Monday the Dili home of Nobel Peace laureate Bishop Carlos Belo was destroyed and Bishop Belo, East TimorÕs spiritual leader, was evacuated to Darwin in northern Australia, before travelling to Europe. Meanwhile on Wednesday the 82-year-old Manuel Gusmao, father of rebel leader Jose Alexandre ÒXananaÓ Gusmao was murdered by militias Ð there is no news of GusmaoÕs sister and her husband who had looked after his father in Dili.
Catholic Church leaders say the militias are systematically killing priests and nuns as part of a broader genocide. 
Refugees speaking on condition of anonymity, fearing retribution from militia leaders, have said hundreds were killed, their bodies dumped and mutilated Ð their heads mounted on sticks lining roads out of Dili Ð in the days after the United Nations announced the referendumÕs results.
ÒI saw dozens of people shot,Ó said one man, who watched militiamen storm Bishop BeloÕs home. ÒMilitiamen wearing black shirts and masks stabbed a young man right in front of me. He bled to death.Ó
Independent confirmation of the death toll is impossible. Militias have threatened to kill foreign journalists or observers who try to enter East Timor or the refugee camps.
U.N. staff evacuated to Darwin report that everything in Dili has been razed to the ground and looted. Only the U.N. compound Ð that had held some 2,000 refugees a few days ago Ð remains and that is under sporadic attack.
In the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, Foreign Minister Ali Alatas denies massacres are taking place and rejects plans to send in an armed U.N. force before it ratifies the East Timor vote, which could take up to two months.
ÒDon't hector us and lecture us, don't pressure us and donÕt give us ultimatums,Ó he said.
As international outrage grows the United States has suspended all military ties with Indonesia. Australia has announced it may break economic ties with Indonesia, annually worth $3.9 billion, foreign ministers at an Asia-Pacific summit have demanded that Indonesian leaders stop the massacres and the International Monetary Fund has put on hold a decision to approve a $450 million loan to Jakarta.
IndonesiaÕs President B. J. Habibie, who introduced martial law on Tuesday, is facing a power struggle with General Wiranto, the army chief who controls some 22,000 Indonesian troops in East Timor.
Wiranto has presidential aspirations but most believe he will back the popular Megawati Sukarnoputri, Mr HabibieÕs main challenger and supporter of the East Timor anti-independence movement.
It was Habibie, to the fury of his military, who early this year suddenly offered East Timorese their independence Ð and to the shock of many overwhelming numbers chose exactly that.
The combination of violence and rumours of a coup has pummelled the stock market and IndonesiaÕs currency has nose-dived. By Thursday the rupiah hit 9,000 to the U.S. dollar, down from Rp8,250 prior to the independence vote and Rp6,700 in mid July.
The fall has wiped out most of the yearÕs economic recovery, threatening a renewed financial crisis for an economy still labouring under an unrepayable $80 billion private sector debt burden, and dependent on a $43 billion IMF-coordinated rescue.
It was ousted president SuhartoÕs decision to invade East Timor in 1975, shortly after a hurried Portuguese exit, in what was intended to prevent another bastion of communism in Asia.
Since then East Timor has become a foreign policy albatross for Indonesia, souring its relations with the outside world, most of which considers its rule there illegal.
The invasion (December 7, 1975) had, as far as Indonesians are concerned, the clear support of neighbouring Australia and the United States, just months after the humiliating fall of Saigon (April 31, 1975) to North Vietnamese troops.
Suharto brutally crushed dissent. A quarter of the local population Ð about 200,000 people Ð died in the fighting and the famine and outbreaks of disease that followed.
Indonesia went on to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building roads and bridges and infrastructure projects in East Timor, one of the most impoverished parts of of equatorial Asia. Despite human rights abuses Jakarta has given the province the highest per capita funding of any community in the 17,000-island archipelago. It also maintains the largest number of troops per capita in East Timor.
And it is General WirantoÕs military which has encouraged the militias to embark on their campaign of terror. If the independence vote is ratified his Òscorched earthÓ policy will leave East Timor with about as much as it had before the Indonesians arrived.
/Ends
Sources: Reuters, BBC World Service, L'Osservatore Romano